One of the Doctor's longest serving companions, she appears as a
regular in 18 stories over four seasons of the classic series and
four episodes of the revived series, and is the first companion to
appear in a spin-off, the 1981
television pilot K-9 and
Company. She is the central character of the ongoing
series The Sarah Jane
Adventures.

Appearances

Television

1973-1976,1981,1983; introduction and classic run

Sarah Jane first appears in the Third
Doctor serial The Time
Warrior, where she has managed to infiltrate a top secret
research facility by posing as her aunt, Lavinia Smith, a famous
virologist. Sneaking into the TARDIS while the Doctor is preparing to follow the
trail of a kidnapped scientist through time, she becomes embroiled
in the subsequent adventure in the Middle Ages.

Sarah Jane then finds herself working with the Third Doctor and
UNIT (United
Nations Intelligence
Taskforce, now UNified
Intelligence Taskforce) on a
number of occasions. She is present when he regenerates into the
Fourth Doctor at the end of Planet of the Spiders, and
continues to accompany him on his journeys through time and
space.

As a companion she is confident and inquisitive, and possesses a
sharp mind as well as a sharp tongue. She is also a feminist — in her first appearance she is
infuriated when the Doctor asks her to make coffee, and she often
verbally spars with fellow companion Harry Sullivan, who has an old-fashioned and
unintentionally patronising attitude towards her. However, this
does not get in the way of forming a close friendship with him. In
The Monster of
Peladon, the Doctor advises Sarah Jane to share concepts
of Women's Lib with Queen Thalira, whose
power is limited on her planet because of her gender. In later
episodes, Sarah Jane's views become less vocalised, but she never
gives the impression that she is less than capable. In spite of the
dangerous and frightening situations she often finds herself in,
she loves adventure and risk, and in spite of her outward
complaints, is always thrilled to go off in search of more
adventure. She shares a rapport with the Third and Fourth Doctors,
and is consistently one of the Doctor's most popular companions
among fans.

Her departure from the TARDIS coincides with the Doctor's summons
to his home planet, Gallifrey, to which he
was forbidden to take humans at that point. However, his attempt
to materialise the TARDIS near her flat in South Croydon falls short of the mark.Thirty years later,
when she encounters the Tenth Doctor in
"School Reunion", she
reveals that he had in fact abandoned her in Aberdeen,
Scotland. Between being dropped off by the Fourth Doctor and
meeting the Tenth Doctor, Sarah Jane was herself summoned to
Gallifrey where she was reunited with the Third Doctor, and met the
First, Second and Fifth
Doctors (in The Five
Doctors). In the period after she was returned to Earth,
she tells the Tenth Doctor, she gave up waiting for him to return
and concluded that he had died. However, she later goes on to say
that she had a feeling that the Doctor was on the alien spaceship
above London in "The Christmas
Invasion".

2006-present; revived series and spin-off

At the time of "School Reunion"', Sarah Jane is still single, and
suggests to the Doctor that she found it difficult to hold down a
lasting relationship with any man following her experiences with
him. At the episode's conclusion, he leaves her a new K-9 model, to
replace the destroyed K-9 Mark III he sent her as a gift in
K-9 & Company.

In the lead-up to the broadcast of "School Reunion", Sladen was
quoted in The Daily Mirror
being somewhat critical of the characterisation of Sarah Jane in
the original programme: "Sarah Jane used to be a bit of a cardboard
cut-out. Each week it used to be, 'Yes Doctor, no Doctor', and you
had to flesh your character out in your mind — because if you
didn't, no one else would." She spoke more favourably of the
characterisation in the new series.

In the time between "School Reunion" and "Invasion of the Bane" (at
least a year and a half), K-9 has left Sarah Jane to close off a
black hole but occasionally passes close
enough to contact her. Although K-9 appeared in the special and in
a scene in one episode, he will not appear as a recurring
character: the rights to the character of K-9 are owned by writer
Bob Baker, who is developing a separate Australian TV show entitled
K-9, an independent
production with no other ties to Doctor Who.

Sarah Jane drives an emerald green Nissan
Figaro and investigates alien interactions with Earth aided by
a sentient supercomputer named Mr Smith. A watch that
scans for alien life and a lipstick-shaped sonic screwdriver were, according to
the show's website, gifts from the Doctor, hidden
inside K-9 Mark IV when it was left for her at the end of the
events shown in "School Reunion". Her low-key methods of
investigation have helped protect the Earth from alien attack,
which contrast to the more abrasive and militaristic approaches of
UNIT and the Torchwood Institute, who, according to
Sarah Jane, tend to go in "all guns blazing". Her investigations are
covert and remain unknown to her neighbours in Bannerman Road,
Ealing which has encouraged her reputation for being
formidable and reclusive.

In "Invasion of the Bane", she
adopted a son, Luke Smith, and
befriended neighbour Maria Jackson
during her investigation of the Bubble Shock! manufacturing plant,
remarking that since meeting them she is no longer content to live
alone. When asked why she never married, she replies that there was
only one man for her, to whom no
one could ever compare.

During the course of the first series she learns how to be a mother
to Luke and starts to become more "mumsy" as she puts it. She and
Maria share a close friendship to the point where Maria is the
person Sarah Jane "trusts the most". Along with Luke and his friend
Clyde Langer they defeat various
threats to Earth such as the Bane, the Slitheen, the Gorgon and General Kudlak.

The 13-year old Sarah Jane

In Whatever
Happened to Sarah Jane? we meet thirteen year old Sarah
Jane, played by Jessica Ashworth,
in 1964. In that year, Sarah Jane witnessed the death of her friend
Andrea
Yates who fell from a pier they were both playing upon and whom
Sarah Jane was unable to rescue. It was this event that gave Sarah
Jane a thirst for justice, and a strong desire to fight against
loss of life.

Sarah Jane crosses back over to Doctor Who in the two-part
fourth series finale "The Stolen
Earth"/"Journey's
End", along with Luke, Mr. Smith, and K-9. Here she encounters
Davros again, who still recognizes her. She plays a major role in
the episodes, temporarily rejoining the Doctor as a companion. Once
she helps summon him with the subwave network and Mr. Smith, she
heads out to meet up with him but is stopped by two Daleks who go
to kill her. Before they can however, Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler
teleport in and kill them. With Jackie and Mickey she is taken
prisoner but manages to escape into a side room in the Crucible
before she can be killed by the Reality Bomb. She, Jackie, Mickey
and Jack Harkness try to threaten Davros (who recognised her from
Genesis of the Daleks and was surprised) into stopping the Reality
Bomb with a Warp Star she owned, but are captured once again. She
witnesses the disarming of the Reality Bomb, the destruction of all
the Daleks and the presumed death of Davros. During the towing of
Earth home she pilots the TARDIS herself alongside the Doctor,
Mickey Smith, Rose Tyler, Martha Jones and Jack Harkness but after
it lands runs home to Luke. She is also able to shorten the process
of transferring the TARDIS base code numerals to Mr. Smith by
summoning K-9 to do it.

The second series of The Sarah Jane Adventures reveals new
backstory about Sarah Jane's family. Her parents, Eddie Smith and
Barbara Wilson Smith, died in a car accident in 1951, orphaning
Sarah Jane and leaving her to be raised by her Aunt Lavinia. As a
girl in her Aunt Lavinia's house, Sarah Jane was frightened by a clown doll.

She has a brief romantic relationship with barrister Peter Dalton
and an aborted wedding ceremony in the third series episode of
The Sarah Jane Adventures, "The Wedding of Sarah Jane
Smith.The Trickster once again lures someone by
preventing their would-be death, in order to change Sarah Jane's
life.In this case, he spares Dalton fom a household
accident and inserts him into Sarah Jane's life; in the end, Dalton
rejects the Trickster and accepts his own death, leaving Sarah Jane
a quasi-widow at the altar.Owing to the Trickster's
temporal phase shift, she is perceived by the guests - aside from
Luke, Rani, Clyde, K-9 and the Doctor - to have been abandoned by
Dalton.

Age, period set, and the UNIT dating controversy

In Pyramids of Mars,
broadcast 1976, she states (more than once) that she was "from
1980", which implies that her adventures with the Doctor took place
in the near future with respect to the time of broadcast. This has
been of some significance in what has become known as the UNIT dating controversy - a debate
as to in which time period the stories depicting the Third and
Fourth Doctor as UNIT's scientific adviser were
set.

"A Girl's Best Friend", the sole episode of K-9 and Company, is set 18-25 December
1981 (airing three days later), and Sarah Jane's adventures with
the Doctor and UNIT are part of her memory. Moreover, she receives
K-9 Mark III from the Doctor in that episode, it having waited in a
crate for her since 1978, and retains it until "School Reunion" in 2006, never
having had it during her tenure with the Doctor.

In The Sarah Jane Adventures, the character has been
depicted as being born in the spring of 1951 (she was shown as a
baby in August 1951 in The Temptation of Sarah Jane
Smith and as 13 in 1964 in Whatever Happened to Sarah
Jane?. Secrets of the
Stars reveals her birthsign is Taurus, placing her
birthday in April or May). In the Third Doctor, and the character's
second, story Invasion of
the Dinosaurs, broadcast 1974, the character stated she
was 23, implying that her adventures with the Doctor took place
contemporaneously with the time of broadcast.

In the Past Doctor Adventure Bullet Time, Sarah Jane is
apparently killed- although the story is ambiguous about her
demise- in 1997 when she sacrifices herself so that she cannot be
used as a hostage to stop the Seventh
Doctor from taking action to aid an escaping alien ship,
contradicting her other spin-off appearances. However, the novel
takes place during a story arc where enemies of the Doctor were
attempting to eliminate his companions from the timeline, and Sarah
Jane's death may have been reversed when those enemies are
defeated. In any case, other stories have shown her alive after
1997.

Sarah Jane was mentioned in the prologue of the Virgin Publishing novelisation of
The Power of the
Daleks by John Peel. It revealed that Sarah Jane was
working as UNIT's official chronicler and that
in "1996" she covered the aftermath of the Cybermen's failed attempt to drain Earth of its energy and the technology left behind in
their wake (The Tenth
Planet, which was actually set in 1986).

Stories written as in-universe articles in Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special
1991 (subtitled "UNIT Exposed"), made statements about Sarah Jane's
life after leaving the Fourth Doctor. She wrote a history of UNIT,
Fighting for Humankind ("heavily vetted and evidently
subjected to considerable censorship"), as well as a series of
science fiction novels. These featured an extraterrestrial called
the Doctor and his companion Nicola Jones, who frequently
encountered WIN (World Investigative Network), commanded by General
Lutwidge-Douglas. Titles included Day of the Dinosaurs,
Sutekh the Destroyer and The North Sea
Monster.

The continuity of Sarah Jane's appearances in these works, like all
Doctor Who media, is unclear, and they may not even take
place in the same continuity as one another. For example, the
novels' mention of Sarah Jane as having been married is
contradicted by the Sarah Jane Smith audio play
Dreamland, and the Sarah Jane Adventures episode
"Invasion of the Bane".

Audio drama

Between seasons
13 and 14,
Sladen appeared as Sarah Jane, with Tom Baker as the Fourth Doctor,
in the audio play LP The
Pescatons (1976). She also appeared with Baker in "The
Time Machine", episode three of the BBC Radio series Exploration Earth
on 4 October 1976.

Sarah Jane also appears in two audiobook stories based on the
Sarah Jane Adventures (released in November 2007) on
CD: The Glittering Storm by Stephen Cole and The Thirteenth
Stone by Justin Richards, with
both stories read by series star Elisabeth Sladen. This is the first time
that BBC Audiobooks have commissioned new content for exclusive
release on audio.. Two new audio stories ("Ghost House" and "Time
Capsule") were released in November 2008, both read again by
Sladen..

The canonicity of Sarah Jane's appearances in the audio dramas is,
like all Doctor Whospin-off media, unclear, and they may
not even take place in the same continuity as one another. For
example, the novels' mention of Sarah Jane as having been married
is contradicted by the Sarah Jane Smith audio play
Dreamland, and the Sarah Jane Adventures episode
"Invasion of the Bane".

Reprising the role

Elisabeth Sladen has returned to the role of Sarah Jane eleven
times since she left Doctor Who in 1976:

In a 1981 pilot for a proposed spin-off television series titled
K-9 and Company where Sarah
Jane was given K-9 Mark III. She was also said to have worked for
the Reuters news agency. However, the
planned series never materialised.

Sladen played Sarah Jane again in the 1983 20th anniversary
special The Five Doctors,
appearing alongside Jon Pertwee once
more (K-9 also made a brief appearance, directly referring to the
events of K-9 and
Company).